M (Fritz Lang 1931): Murder and Modern Mapping

M (dir. Fritz Lang 1931) tells the story of a serial killer who preys on children in 1930s Berlin, and who is on the run from police and an organized crime syndicate. The film begins with the murder of Elsie, the eighth child to be murdered. At the crime scene police find a paper bag filled with candy crumbs which leads the detectives to search for the store that sold the killer the candy. This search is represented by a cinematic map. This map is centered on the place where the body was found. The search process is illustrated by a compass drawing circles around the neighborhood to illustrate the widening of the search. This 18 secondes animated map can be considered as a turning point in the history of modern cartography since it is both an allusion to classical cartographic techniques and one of the first “modern” maps.

This map is an allusion to classical cartographic techniques for different reasons:

Two shots angled have been used for this map, which refer to the two perspectives that have dominated cartography historically: (1) the oblique perspective – or “perspective militaire” – has been widely used by artists since the Middle Ages, to represent landscapes. (2) The vertical perspective or bird’s eye view characterizes the more modern and scientific representation of Earth. These two subsequents views of the same map capture the passage from a classic to a more modern perspective in cartography.

Cinematic Map in M - Vertical perspective

The presence of the compass symbolizes the importance of geometry in the history of cartography and its uses to explore and map the world. The compass appears in many paintings of the 17th century related to geography, including the famous “The geographer” from Vermeer (1668-1669). The presence of the compass in the shot emphasizes the idea of a hand-drawn map. But the hand holding the compass is never visible in the shot. In other words, the compass seems to draw the circles mechanically instead of manually. In this sense, the map is no longer totally drawn by hand. It is already automated and this alludes to a more “modern” notion of cartography.

This is the first reason this map can be considered as one of the first modern maps:

According to Michael Goodchild, “the most straightforward objective of digital technology is the emulation of manual methods, to the point where the two products are indistinguishable” (Goodchild, 1988: 317). This map is made both manually and automatically which represents a turning point between hand-made classical cartography and machine rendered digital cartography;

This map integrates a new media: sound. The use of synchronized sound in cinema only became fully operational in 1928 and common by 1930. M is the first synch-sound film by Fritz Lang and this cinematic map of 1931 may well have been the first audio-visual map ever made;

This map is no longer about a journey – like most of the cinematic maps of that time – but about measurement and spatial analysis. The circles created with the compass symbolize the creation of what is called in GIS language “buffer zones.” Even if we know that spatial measurement existed long before the appearance of GIS, this map suggests the early existence of analytical processes.

Overall, this cinematic map can be considered a turning point between classical and “modern” cartography as the it conceptualizes many of the functions of contemporary digital cartography.